2 weeks Ago
Students of various cultures from across the William S. Hart Union High School District made their way to Valencia High School for the inaugural district-wide International Culture Night on Wednesday. Culture Fest , a Valencia tradition for the past couple of years that occurred during brunch for Valencia students, set the theme for Wednesday evening.
With clubs donating food by setting up tables throughout Valencia’s quad, students and teachers could indulge in various types of food such as Korean, Mexican, Filipino, Vietnamese, Indian and Middle Eastern, to name a few. Valencia ASB President Maya Yiadom and Maddox Espinosa, Valencia ASB member and co-founder of the Filipino Culture Club, both 17, organized and coordinated with the students throughout the district since May. “Maddox and I have both been really involved in our cultural clubs on campus, so we wanted to start the tradition of having it be all schools and then after school,” Yiadom said.
“We started ideating in May, so we’ve been working all summer and throughout the school year to plan this. We’ve been working really hard to coordinate all of this, and we’re really happy with the turn out.” Espinosa expressed the difficulty of creating an event at a much larger scale, at a time that students are hardly ever on campus.
“It was a huge process, because at first we had to actually get other people, other representatives from every school, as opposed to this just being Valencia. It was also a lot harder because this is something during school, so everyone was already there, but for this, we had to get participants willing to bring food outside of school, and being willing to participate at this time of hour.” Other difficulties included ensuring that each group was reminded and checked on throughout the months leading up to Wednesday’s event.
“It took a lot of being able to keep reminding them over and over, like, ‘This is what you need to do.’ And just keep reminding them, ‘Oh, this is the day. Please have this done,’” Espinosa said.
“We had to have them all fill out the ingredient form, so we kept checking up on them. And even today, we kept going around asking if anyone had their forms and that they know what they’re supposed to do.” Yiadom and Espinosa attended Bridgeport Elementary School and Tesoro del Valle Elementary School, respectively, and were exposed to different cultures at an early age, where classmates were often from many countries throughout the world.
“I love the idea of bringing other people around. We thought, ‘Oh, why don’t we just bring the whole community around and have others be able to participate — not just Valencia,’” Espinosa said. “There’s so many diverse cultures represented throughout the valley, so we really wanted to bring everybody together, rather than just have our side of town.
Golden Valley, [for example,] has a lot of great programs, and so do all of these other schools that are here. So we wanted to create unity within the SCV community,” Yiadom added. According to Yiadom, the clubs and representatives that were present included the Saugus and Valencia Filipino Culture Club, the Black Student Union from Golden Valley and Valencia and the Spanish Honor Society from schools across the district.
In addition, Golden Valley choir, and later the Golden Valley ballet folklorico, put on performances for the event, as well as a Saugus student who sang a traditional song in Tagalog. Yiadom and Espinosa expressed gratitude, not only in the turnout of the event, but also in working with a partner who had hoped for the same outcome. “It was really great working with Maddox.
A lot of the time, it’s hard to plan events on your own, so I think that we both had an equal passion for the event, and we both really wanted to make this happen. So I’m really grateful that I had such an amazing partner to work with throughout this as well,” Yiadom said. “We’re really proud of everybody who came and showed up for this event, and we’re excited to see where it goes in coming years.
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